Facebook’s Goal is to Monetize and Weaponize Your Data

If you search for the goal of Facebook, this is one result you will get, “Facebook is a business that has a purpose of creating revenue, enriching investors and providing jobs. Because it does not charge users for having Facebook pages, it needs to generate revenue from other sources. Facebook produces most of its revenue from advertising, including ads for both large and small advertisers.”

Let’s be honest here, Facebook has one objective, to enhance shareholder value. They do this by advertising and by monetizing and weaponizing your data. Their desire is your data, your pictures and your user content sold to the highest bidder.

Take for example the 2016 election run up. Cambridge Analytica received contracts from the Trump campaign and many other prominent Republicans for “microtargeting” which according to CA marketing materials where CA brags that “they were able to design and deploy messages tailored to these audiences according to their particular psychographic profiles.” Profiles developed from Facebook user data and supposedly Russian military intelligence.

Current national security advisor John Bolton’s SuperPAC paid for almost 1.2 million dollars of CA services from 2014 through 2016. Sources

The Trump campaign paid for almost 6 million dollars of CA services, Ted Cruz for president campaign paid 5.8 million dollars. At the tail end of the list of Republicans was Roy Blunt, famed child molester, who paid 12,000 for CA services. Data that originated from Facebook.

From a story just this Friday on CNET Facebook said a breach affecting 50 million users was discovered. The breach utilized the “view as” feature which allows people to see what their profiles look like to other people. Attackers exploited code associated with the feature that allowed them to steal “access tokens” that could be used to take over people’s accounts. The breach also impacted Instagram accounts as well.

My personal recommendation is to delete your Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts after you utilize the download your data feature. Be advised that while your data will be deleted, your account with your friends remains deactivated until you decide (as they hope) that you can’t live without Facebook. Don’t do it.